When Walter Felsenstein is offered to shoot at adaptation of the story about Fidelio / Leonore in the early fifties, he accepts. Together with Hanns Eisler, he develops a whole new version of the story by changing, cutting out and rearranging parts of the text. The overture is incorporated into the filmic adaptation and tells the prelude of the story. In doing this, Felsenstein uses the medium in a whole new way. The music is not only there to accompany the images; Fidelio is not meant to be an operatic film but a musical film. "Arthaus's scholarly and imposing" Walter Felsenstein Edition "offers a fascinating glimpse of an important moment in operatic history now vanished." The New York Times